"Microsoft has been absolutely pummeled in the press and in reader comments this week by pundits and customers alike. They feel cheated by the amount of free storage space available to them on the new line of Surface Pro devices. But is that criticism fair or even valid?" Spoiler alert: turns out, it isn't. Both devices have about the same free space available, and by creating a USB restore drive for Windows on the Surface, you can actually get a little more on the Surface Pro. Interestingly enough, Microsoft confirmed on Reddit that their original numbers - which caused the ruckus - were wrong, because they were based on pre-production hardware, with debug code and other additional stuff on it. Oh Microsoft.

Initial reports out regarding available disk space were conservative (eg. 23GB available on 64GB and 83GB available on the 128GB system), however our final production units are coming in with ~6-7GB additional free space.

So instead of 23GB free on the 64GB version, we now get 30GB free. So still less than half of the drive available for the user! I'm sorry, but that is still wholly unacceptable. They should advertise it prominently as a 23-30GB usable drive, period. To do any less is deceptive.